Joe Kueser's Blog Another Geek Finding His Place on the Web

Hypermiling: Or How To Piss Off Anyone

A little background...I live in a small town (which will remain nameless, lest everyone in town will lynch me). The people here are some of the most polite, laid back drivers I have ever experienced. It is not at all unusual to:

• Get stuck behind a driver going 5 to 10 miles per hour under the speed limit.
• Be in line at a fast food drive-thru with full car lengths between each car in front of you.
• Be stopped at a stop light with the guy in front of the line two full car lengths short of the stoplight.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone driving diagonally across the parking lot.
• Narrowly avert an accident with someone drifting happily across the double-yellow line.
• Have someone smile at you and wave you in to traffic that you are trying to merge into.

So you would think it would be really hard to drive in any way that would get these people into a frenzy. Well, I’ve discovered it, and it’s called hypermiling.

In short, hypermiling is a way of driving that increases your miles per gallon. There are all kinds of techniques to make this happen, and most of them seem pretty logical. Stuff like not accelerating too fast, keeping at the speed limit, taking advantage of gravity and coasting down hills. You can find several articles and tips on Google.

Slow acceleration and going at or below the speed limit are great ways to piss off even the most patient driver.

Using this technique, I managed to get 21.5 miles per gallon out of my minivan, which when driving normally gets 18 MPG. I am hypermiling on my Civic this week, and don’t yet know what kind of results I will get, but I’ve used somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of a tank of gas, and have gone about 100 miles. It looks like I will be getting between 35 and 40 MPG, where I normally get 28 to 32.

Here’s to saving a few bucks.